A Dream of Stone & Shadow Read online

  Aggie left him sprawled on the ground and ran back to Quinn and the van. Police sirens curled through the air, closing in. Any minute the cops would roll up and there would be some tough explaining to do. She was not worried. All the evidence she needed was inside that van—everything that would make it easy to explain why she and Quinn had gone ape-shit on two strangers.

  Of course, the how of that knowledge was another matter entirely, but the agents at Dirk & Steele were good at deflecting those kinds of questions. It came with the territory of keeping secrets, of being different from the rest of the world in profound ways. A life like that cultivated the ability to wheedle around the truth, to protect your own life while still doing good. A necessary evil, one that Aggie supposed lay at the core of her employer’s turn-of-the-century foundation. Hiding and helping. Dirk & Steele showed itself off to the public as an internationally respected detective agency, but that was just a mask. A ruse. Underneath ran deeper waters.

  The van’s second passenger lay on the sidewalk at Quinn’s feet. Aggie did not know his name and she was utterly uninterested in learning it. His hands were tied and he bled from a shoulder wound. His gun lay on the driver’s seat inside the van.

  “Have you checked the interior?” Aggie asked, dreading his answer.

  “No,” Quinn said. “It took me a hell of a time just to get this guy out.”

  Not surprising. Most big men did not take kindly to Quinn ordering them around, even with a gun in his hand. It was a height thing. Aggie thought that was funny. Being wicked short had its own superpower: it turned grown adults into dumbasses.

  The back door was locked. The keys were still in the ignition. Aggie heard a shuffling sound when she reached into the van to grab them; the front seats were separated from the rest of the vehicle by a steel grill. On the other side hung a black curtain. Aggie’s stomach tightened.

  She accidentally kicked the gunman in the balls and head on her way to the back of the van. Stomped once on the bullet wound in his shoulder. Smiled when he screamed. Quinn’s lips twitched. He was much better at hiding his mean streak than Aggie was.

  The police arrived just as she opened the back door. She heard them begin the usual shouting, the typical demands of “hands up, stay still,” but she ignored that, staring inside the van at the equipment, the crude bed and props. A makeshift moving film studio.

  And there on the carpeted floor, bound and gagged and squirming, was the very young star of the show.

  His name was Rujul, and he was not from America. He spoke very little English, had no papers, and could only tell them—falteringly, mixed with Hindi—that he had been with these men for quite some time.

  Rujul did not say the men had hurt him, but he did not need to. Everyone there saw the bruises, the hollowness of his face, the emptiness in his gaze. They saw the stacked and dated tapes inside the van. The boy was not much older than twelve.

  “International child smuggling for the sex industry,” Quinn said. “Put a fork in my eyes right now.”

  Aggie said nothing. That she felt sickened was not a strong enough word; neither was rage. Only, a deep abiding calm spread through her aching heart as she watched Rujul disappear into the ambulance, a certainty that someone was going to hurt for this, maybe die, maybe burn in Hell, and she would be there when it happened. Her gift was still dark, the future quiet, but Aggie did not need her inner sight to know the probable outcomes of this particular day.

  Her cell phone rang. She glanced at the screen. “It’s Roland.”

  “Perfect timing,” Quinn said, his voice quiet, distant. “I need to ask him how he does that.”

  Aggie was too tired to smile. “He’s the boss. His powers are unnatural.”

  She answered the phone. There was a distinct pause on the other end as Roland Dirk got his bearings—a hitch, a sucking in of breath as his clairvoyant vision kicked in—and then he said, in the succinct way only he was capable, “Fuck.”

  “Yes,” Aggie said. “That’s about right.”

  “I need to buy you a new car,” Roland said. “Maybe you can outfit it with a battering ram. Jesus Christ, Aggie.”

  She did not feel particularly apologetic. “It had to be done. Didn’t matter how. We had to get Yarns off the street.”

  “Yeah. The police called. They said you caught the fucker and his accomplice red-handed. Roughed them up a little.”

  “I don’t think anyone is going to complain. There was a boy with them, Roland. I didn’t realize they had a captive until I saw the van with my own two eyes. They were going to get rid of him tonight, with a seventy percent probability of death.”

  “Any reason why?”

  Aggie shook her head. “David and his friend were on their way to a double meeting with a client and smuggler. Future was fuzzy, so I can’t give you any names or locations, but it looked to me like they were going to try and sell the kid. Exchange him. And if that didn’t work, dump his body in a river. Rujul is twelve, and that’s close to puberty. Odds are, they wanted someone younger to take his place.”

  “I’m going to puke,” Quinn muttered.

  “I’m with him,” Roland said, overhearing. “Holy shit. I hate this.”

  Understatement of the century. Aggie said, “Today was just one piece of it. We know David has a boss. We still need to find him.”

  “And then what?” Quinn asked. He could only hear Aggie’s side of the conversation, but it was clear from the look on his face that was enough. “We began investigating these child porn rings because of an increased flux in local kidnappings, but so what? Even if Dirk & Steele devotes all its resources to stopping this industry, it’ll be a losing battle. Too much ground to cover, too much money, too many opportunists.”

  “Too many potential victims,” Aggie said. “There’s no rest for the wicked when they’ve got Third World countries and rich perverts playing buffet.”

  “I don’t want to hear this,” Roland said. “We do what we can. Maybe it’s not enough, maybe today won’t even make a dent, but a life is a life. You guys really want to quit after saving that kid and taking David Yarns and his porn mobile off the street? For Christ’s sake, give me a break.”

  His voice was loud enough that Quinn could hear him. He winced. So did Aggie.

  “I gotta go,” Roland said. “You two take a break. Go somewhere. Stay at home. Read a book. Find people to have sex with. Have sex with each other. I don’t care what, but do anything but think of this.”

  “After everything we’ve just seen, Roland, that’s about as offensive an idea as any I can come up with.”

  “What?” Quinn asked.

  “He wants us to take a vacation,” Aggie told him. “And have sex with each other.”

  “I’m not offended by that,” Quinn said. “Really.”

  “There’s more work that needs to be done,” Aggie replied.

  “And you’ll do it,” Roland said. “But I need you fresh. The two of you do this much longer and you’ll burn out. It’s happening already.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Sweetheart, you and the gunslinger are depressed because you saved a kid from a fate worse than death. You tell me how that sounds.”

  Aggie looked at the phone and gave it the finger.

  “Nice try,” Roland said. “But that ain’t no insult. Now, go. Chew on your ankles somewhere else. I’ll deflect the police and the feds if they come looking for you. I’ll also try to send Max or one of the other telepaths down to the station to see if they can get close enough to your perverts for a reading on who they might have been contacting. Yarns might have some names floating around his head right about now.”

  “Good,” Aggie said. “But I still hate you.”

  “I know.” Roland snorted. “But that doesn’t mean you’re fired. I haven’t used you up yet. When you’re a shriveled husk, then you can collect unemployment.”

  “And here I thought you liked us all for more than our minds.”

  “No,”
Roland said. “I’m a bastard through and through.”

  He hung up on her. Aggie considered destroying her phone, but the emphasis would be lost, Roland couldn’t see her anymore. His clairvoyance was dependent on particular connections.

  Quinn shuffled his feet. “We’re off the case?”

  “Temporarily,” Aggie said. “Until we become shiny happy people again.”

  “Well,” Quinn said. “I’m toast.”

  “Yeah.” Aggie sighed. She recalled Rujul’s terrified eyes staring at her face as she opened the van door. One boy—one kid rescued—and odds were high that somewhere in the world at least a hundred more had just been recruited to replace him. It was enough to make a person roll up in a ball and cry.

  But at least David Yarns and his friend were off the street. Hello, jail. Aggie hoped they got it good. Child molesters did not last long within the prison system; incarceration of any kind was an eventual death sentence. The other prisoners saw to that.

  She watched the police walk the scene, taking photographs of the van interior and crash site. She worried about Rujul; the FBI would probably send in its own social worker to evaluate him, and after that—with no papers and no family—he might be deported. Aggie could not imagine what would happen to him then.

  “So, now what?” Quinn asked.

  “Home,” Aggie replied, and for a moment felt something warm against her neck, a deep inexplicable flush that did not seem at all internal. She touched herself; her hand warmed, too. Like a caress, a breath of something heavier than air. Aggie shivered, but not because she was cold.

  “What is it?” Quinn asked. “You see something?”

  “No,” Aggie said, frowning. She rubbed her hands against her jeans. The warmth around her neck fled, but it left another in its wake, a heat that spread through her body, low into her gut. She did not dare call it erotic, because that would just be weird, but for a moment the sensation opened an ache in her heart, a deep abiding loneliness.

  You have never been in love, she thought, and could not understand why now of all times she would think such a startling thing, and why it instilled within her such a deep sense of loss for something she had never had, something she should not miss.

  “Aggie,” Quinn said, staring.

  “Nothing,” she told him, forcing herself to focus. “Really, Quinn. I’m going through a blackout at the moment.”

  “Ah.” He said nothing else, but she could tell he did not completely believe her. Which was fine. They were good enough friends to respect the space each of them needed. Working out the devils in the mind—and heart—were sometimes best done in a solitary fashion.

  “Will your car drive?” he asked her. She gave him a look and he shrugged.

  “Come on,” he said, taking her hand. The top of his head only came up to her waist, but his grip was sure and strong. “Let’s hit the big street and find a cab.”

  “I can call one.”

  “I need the walk,” he said, and after a moment, Aggie agreed. A little air, a little sunlight. It was a beautiful day. Best to remind herself of that.

  She glanced over her shoulder as they left the crime scene. Looked at her car, the van, the lingering police. She did not see anyone watching them.

  But her neck tingled, and she remembered the warmth, the pressure on her skin, and wondered.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Charlie’s brothers were made of stone, so the conversation was rather limited within the confines of his prison. Still, he tried, because he remembered the life of before, the life of midnight runs and wild scents, the life of a bright moon floating halo-like in the sky, full and pregnant in the heavens. A good life, even if much of it had been hidden.

  Good, however, was not the word Charlie would use to describe his current circumstances, though in all honesty he thought it possible to feel a small amount of pride that he had done as well as he had. After all, he was not stone. The curse that had taken his siblings had not reached as far on his body—an accident of fate, as far as he was concerned—and though the witch had a taste for his flesh in all manner and form, he had managed to plead some favors with the hag as a matter of courtesy. The witch had some manners left to her. Not many, but enough.

  For example, she cut out his heart whenever he asked her to. Which, in recent days, was quite often. He did not think she minded; hearts were her favorite organ to consume: roasted with peppers, diced and fried with ginger, stewed with carrots and onions. All manners of preparation. Charlie could smell himself now, filling the air with a rich scent that did nothing for his appetite, but which most certainly had the witch’s stomach keening high for a taste, perhaps with a dollop of rice.

  There was nothing better than a gargoyle when hungering for flesh. Or that’s what the witch liked to tell him. Charlie could not, in principle, agree—though he did acknowledge that as far as an endless food supply went, his kind were good to go. Gargoyles were not so very easy to kill.

  And destroying their natures? Even more difficult.

  That was the reason Charlie’s brothers were still cast in stone. If they ever, in their hearts, agreed to the witch’s demands of obedience and degradation, the granite would flake away into flesh, crack and turn to dust upon their bodies. All it took was one word: Yes.

  But, obviously, all three of them were too stubborn for that, and had been for quite some time. Charlie was glad of it. As lonely as he was for their company, he really could not recommend joining the living again, especially with the witch as a mistress. She had, to use the modern colloquial, issues.

  Of course, so did Charlie. And one of those issues was a little girl named Emma.

  “She’s alone,” he said to his brothers, who crouched around him in a semicircle, frozen in varying poses of shock and horror. “And they’re hurting her for money and pleasure.”

  It was a hard thing to hear himself say. Charlie hated it. Hated Kreer and her son with a passion second only to his rage at the witch. Perhaps he had grown accustomed to the hag and her whims, but that did not mean he understood them, or that he felt any compassion for her motives. She had stolen his entire family from their lives—good, modern, integrated lives that had taken years to cultivate—and made his brothers nothing more than stone dolls, ornaments who could still think and feel, forced to mark the passing of time in a kind of stupefying torture, while he…he lived. Lived, and tried to make the best of it, because some day he would ferret out a way to break the curse, and then, freedom. Sweet and happy freedom.

  You are living in a dream world.

  Well, yes. Everyone needed goals.

  Like helping children escape their prisons, those human captors who in their own ways gave the witch a run for her money. The witch was sick, but at least she never targeted children. Not to Charlie’s knowledge, anyway.

  But there were others who did, and Emma—poor little Emma, with her dreams so full of heartfelt distress—was the last and final straw. Charlie, during one of his excursions, had felt her from the other end of the world—a small voice, crying out—and he, dead and dreaming, with his soul separated from his body while his heart and lungs and various other organs grew back from the witch’s cuts, had broken a cardinal rule of his kind and stepped from the shadows to help her.

  He could not stop himself. Gargoyles aided, they protected, and though times had changed and forced his kind to adopt different lives—more human, less circumspect—he could not turn away from his nature, or the child.

  And really, what was the danger? No one believed in magic anymore. No one, that is, except those already capable of it—and Charlie didn’t think any of them were going to rat him out, assuming of course that those particular elements even paid attention to the life of one insignificant gargoyle. And if they did, then shame on them for letting the witch go on as she had.

  He said as much to his brothers, and he pretended they agreed. He also pretended they approved of him summoning in the witch with her long shining knife.

  “I wa
s just about to eat,” said the hag. Her blond hair bounced in a high ponytail, the ends of which skimmed her pale delicate shoulders. She wore an off the shoulder number, white and glittery. Charlie noted a flush to her cheeks. She looked very girlish.

  “Are you also expecting company?” he asked, tracing the sand beneath him with one long silver finger.

  “I am,” she admitted. “How do I look?”

  “I prefer you as a brunette,” Charlie said. “You don’t look as dangerous.”

  “Liar.” She smiled and her teeth were sharp and white. “Besides, I don’t need to worry about looking dangerous. My guest tonight knows exactly what I am.”

  “A cannibal?”

  “Silly. An asset.”

  That was disturbing. “I thought you preferred working alone.”

  “What I prefer is that you not ask so many questions. Don’t worry,” and here she smiled, once again, “I’ll take care of you, no matter what.”

  “How very thoughtful,” he said. “Really.”

  The witch stepped through the circle drawn in the sand: his prison, a mere line of light. She held up the knife and waited.

  “My heart, please,” he said.

  “It is always the quick deaths with you,” she said. “And I suppose you want me to remove everything else, after that?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You really are peculiar,” said the witch. “I can’t imagine why you think death is preferable to the company of your brothers.”

  The witch was not quite as all-knowing as she imagined herself to be. Charlie imagined punching his thumbs through her bright glittering eyes and then eating them like sugarplums. He said, “It’s not the company of my brothers I’m trying to get away from.”